page 163 of a mechanics book marked with a staggered pencil, albums in a corner of a forgotten compartment of the cupboard, customized picture mugs where you and your eleven year old bestfriend are smiling is collecting dust as your life folds away into an unreachable magma and you wait for it to erupt on your veins but the volcano is cold now. there's a bigger hd television in your room now but life escaped with the static of the box television in the living room. cousins have moved out to different countries, all the while abandonment lying in the 163rd page of your mechanics book; coffee mugs stained as death is drawn in patterns of your sips on the coffee mugs. you play zindagi kaisi hai paheli on your spotify and suddenly, loneliness from the unheard radio of 1971 is teleported to your room.
bangladesh has won the freedom.
all the radios switch to songs of joy while that one radio still plays zindagi kaisi hai paheli. people from the tea-stall are all out to celebrate so it sits with the mothers' grief whose sons will never return from the battle arena. it is now in your room. it asks you for acceptance. you show it how grief has evolved. mutant grief is in the television no one watches anymore, new grief is scattered in the seventh letter to the lover who doesn't know you're sorry. new grief is in the wooden cricket bat you haven't touched in years. new grief is in the insomnia lent by your lover's departure. abandonment is still alive. it now looks like the girl in her blush pink kurti and oxidized jwellery as she takes life away with her. she doesn't have to wait for her brothers to die in a battlefield, she kills them in her dreams and mourns life. she knows her life as the bearer of a vacant space where it was meant to be. she doesn't wait for something to fill it; instead, she carves more holes onto it to make space for her twelve year self who is a bit older now. her mechanics book has to fit too. 1971 grief in your room offers some of itself to you. you mix it in your pancakes to eat until life returns from it's voyage. you would slap life and tell it how fat you have gotten from all the grief while abandonment will sit at your doorstep and watch you laugh with life. you would miss grief as you miss an old friend but you would never speak to it again.
